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00:00Penn is one of those companies that we've been following pretty closely from the days at Barstool to the new days at ESPN.
00:10It's one of those sports betting companies that I think people have an eye on because they want to know if they're going to be able to succeed in the industry.
00:17So thanks again for coming on the show. Let's get right to it. Yeah of course Craig. Happy earnings season to you. It's been a really interesting one on this
00:25end. Like you said covering Penn which has been just one of the most interesting companies over the last couple of years as it went from
00:31Barstool and then paid I think two billion dollars almost for ESPN brand. So investors have really been clamoring for when that investment is
00:40going to pay off. They bought it last summer. So it's almost a year that they have under their belts. But essentially what CEO Jay Snowden said
00:48on the earnings call today is just wait a little bit longer. Wait until football season. That's when we're going to have all these big product
00:55enhancements these integrations with ESPN. We're going to have it where if you bet the same game parlay on the ESPN bet app it'll automatically
01:03get trapped into ESPN's regular scores app that so many people use. It's going to use its fantasy football database that hosts so many
01:11different leagues and give customers personalized offers based off of maybe who's on their fantasy team. There's this whole kind of pie in the
01:19sky. Big change is coming for ESPN bet. But it's really a crucial time because you have a large portion of investors calling for Penn to sell
01:29the entire company mainly because of its poor performance with sports betting with online sports betting. So it's pretty tough for Penn to tell
01:38them to kind of keep waiting. You know it's a long term investment when you pay all that money for something and you it takes a long time to
01:44get these product changes going. But they're kind of telling everyone just keep waiting. So in a couple of months actually in less than a
01:50month we'll really know whether they're on track to complete a lot of those things. College football season is right around the corner when ESPN
01:57bet is going to launch in New York. Snowden came out and said today that they won't have a surcharge like Draftkings recently announced
02:05which has been a really hot topic. The thing that's coming to high tax states like New York. But he wants to wait and see how it works out
02:12for Draftkings and didn't commit to having no surcharge in the future. So pretty interesting comments there. You've had other companies
02:19like that rivers come out and say we won't have a surcharge and we're still waiting on the rest of the industry. But the financials were a
02:25little bit better for ESPN this quarter which was kind of to be expected after a really rough first quarter. So we'll have to see kind of
02:31what happens going into football season. We should have some more answers in just a few weeks.